How to market your dancing on youtube?

Okay so from what I understand all the shufflers on youtube who're famous get tons of views after they market themselves and get tons of people subscribed after going to meet-ups and meeting new people, etc.

I wanted some tips on how to get your videos noticed more on youtube, so I can start getting more people to watch my videos. I haven't really dabbed on marketing myself so any tips would help and I'll try them out and see where it goes. Just wanted to get more of a fan base for support, etc. Thanks.


Also is there a way to get endorsed or something so you can make money and buy good outfits, etc

About the question making money, shuffling is an underground dance, we dance to express ourselves, not to get famous and earn money, but if you got youtube partnership and alot of views, you would earn money, but that's from youtube, and not directly from shuffling
and the best way i would say to get your video's known is to first get really good, you won't have fans looking up to you before you're really good and have a unique and smooth/cool looking style When you are good enough, other people who see your video's will start sharing it with friends, and they will share em to their friends again try sharing your vid on facebook every time you upload a vid

But shuffling isnt about getting famous, it's about having fun, if you want to get famous and earn money and stuff, shuffling isnt the dance, since it's a fairly easy dance to learn, so you can't really go for a professional shuffling career, haha, hope i helped abit atleast !

By the way, marketing is used wrong here, marketing is when your trying to sell an item, you want to advertise and not market

Well, first off, shuffling is not easy to learn, there are videos of people tripping all the time, it takes dedication and hard work.

Secondly, there is nothing wrong with trying to become more professional with what you love to do. This forum is for that purpose and I can't just make 200 dollars from nowhere to buy phat pants or to live my life.

and what makes you think I can't go for a shuffling career? I'm already in the midst of starting my own career and it's my passion. I can be what I want to be, Lol.

Professional shufflers do tour around places and get paid, it's not common but it does happen. And just because it's not common, doesn't mean I should give up on my dream or what I love to do. Maybe you should look up Hardstyle Republic and look at what they do to get an idea.

Well first of, shuffling is an easy dance to learn, im not saying you learn it in a week, but compared to other dances, it is an easy dance to learn, people use all their life to get good at dances, with shuffling u can get good in about 6 months.

where are you supposed to get 200 dollars? hmmmm get a job

Second of, you can't become "more professional", a professional is a person who is paid to do special tasks, and who do you suppose would pay you the money, and what would you do for the money, have shows and stuff, or just make videos?

how are you in the midst of starting a shuffling career?

BoyeN wrote:About the question making money, shuffling is an underground dance, we dance to express ourselves, not to get famous and earn money, but if you got youtube partnership and alot of views, you would earn money, but that's from youtube, and not directly from shuffling

Who told you that BoyeN ? What a load of crap. How do you think I've been making a living the past 20 years ? From Shuffling and in the underground !

You're ignorance of art is obvious, artists are allowed to make a living from their art. It's not a hobby it's a career.

How many millions did LMFAO get from shuffling ? How many millions did Gangham style make ?

BoyeN wrote:Well first of, shuffling is an easy dance to learn, im not saying you learn it in a week, but compared to other dances, it is an easy dance to learn, people use all their life to get good at dances, with shuffling u can get good in about 6 months.

where are you supposed to get 200 dollars? hmmmm get a job

Second of, you can't become "more professional", a professional is a person who is paid to do special tasks, and who do you suppose would pay you the money, and what would you do for the money, have shows and stuff, or just make videos?

how are you in the midst of starting a shuffling career?

This is an abusive post BoyeN, yes you do become more professional as you gain experience, you also learn respect for those who try and you are clearly mocking Starkk.

You've got a 5 day ban to think about whether you want to be on this forum. You can email me in 5 days detailing why you should be here.

BoyeN wrote:By the way, marketing is used wrong here, marketing is when your trying to sell an item, you want to advertise and not market

No BoyeN it's you who are wrong. You seem to have some moral objection to artists getting paid for their work and that's nazi talk and it's not welcome here. MSO is anti-slavery.

I just wanted some tips on how to get my videos viewed more and how I can maybe make some money towards some cool shuffling outfits like fancy sweatshirts, phat pants, etc.

I didn't expect an answer like that, I was just looking for some good tips I could try, I apologize Garry if it's caused any trouble. And please if anyone has any tips I would appreciate it.

nah you're cool mate, you asked a very good question BoyeN is just being a prick out of envy.

Yes how do you market yourself on Youtube ?

Firstly ignore the veiw counts and focus on audience building. You might get 5 million veiws, but 4 mil might be people just watching to laugh at you.

Global Shuffle for instance has very few hits, because we are more interested in people seeing the whole movie and buying the DVD, so we focus our marketing by word of mouth or one-to-one personal recommendations. It's a slower pace but we want an audience to stay around and enjoy our work for years to come, not just 3 minutes.

So for career long marketing focus on good product - the whole package of the vid dance, music grafix etc, and keep a long term veiw.

Avoid going viral ! You'll be famous for a few months then people will be sick of you forever. It's show biz, leave them wanting more.

So for instance, here's a pro dance crew called Industrial Rhythm from New York City USA. Made up of professional Broadway and USA TV dancers and percussionists.

Industrial Rhythm website
http://www.industrialrhythm.com/index.html

They have a showreel on Youtube with samples of their work over the years. The video quality varies, but for a Diretor such as me, I can look past the stage clutter to see the dance, I can also see the audience and their responses. I can tell their ages and in this clip, I can recognise a TV (Star Trek-Next Gen, Big Bang Theory) and Bruce Willis in their audience and getting onstage with them ... so in just a few minutes I can tell a lot about these dancers and their audience.

Industrial Rhythm youtube showreel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asWM98Yc-0I



So with your own work, start a best-of youtube clip and keep updating it over the years. Use the link to Youtube more than the Youtube audience. So you target the people who might see it, such as if you were applying for a job with Industrial Rhythm. Their clip isn't a music video, it's a showreel targeted to the Corporate people who are thinking about booking them.

Their fame has come from Broadway which is a pretty good job reference anywhere on the planet , so the person booking them is more interested in seeing if their audience will like them. It's a corporate event with strict protocols and entry, so they need to see examples of a typical corporate audience reacting to their show.

So the act booker may be put off by a lot of Youtube veiws, thinking Oh everybody has probably already seen them on Youtube, so I'll look for someone they probably haven't seen yet.

The same with Global Shuffle, if we had a billion veiws, no cinema or festival would bother looking at screening it, thinking everybody's seen it, it's over now, I'll go for something fresh.

Instead of calling it FAME, we'll call it PUBLIC PROFILE, generally the higher the public profile - the more exposure you have, the more views you'll get.

So you can use the Youtube networking tools, link to Facebook and this forum etc, which all contributes to your public profile. Typically shufflers search for shuffle stuff, how do I learn shuffling for instance or where to buy phats, so make an effort to include search keywords in your Youtube details and actually write those keywords somewhere in your accompanying post text, because it's the words the search looks for not the video content.

MONEY

In western culture talking about money and art is considered perverse. Art is supposed to be above money, and thats a load of crap. It's the myth that art dwells in some utopian paradise of ancient Greece un touched by crass cash. It's a nice secular western myth basically substituting religion with art for some higher cause for the improvement of human kind ... that's just a sales pitch to make you feel spiritual when you look at a painting or Ballet. Good Art can do that, but it does not need western culture to do it. Good deep spiritual art existed long before western culture.

Any serious art collector or artist will tell you money is very important, money drives the commercial art world and it's not perverse, it's business. The same as any art school, college, Uni, it may be distasteful to talk about, but there's fees to be paid to learn art, materials special clothing/equipment to buy, before you even start selling your work.

For musicians/sound artists they have to fight tooth and nail against monster corporations to just get a few cents from the company playing their music and making money from it, again the attitude is that artists don't deserve the money from their own work - it's just crap and greedy business practice that will see artists band together to fight the bad deal all the way to USA Congress.

MUSIC FIRST Coalition
www.musicfirstcoalition.org
http://www.musicfirstcoalition.org/sites/default/files/Artist%20Letter.pdf

We need your help! For over 80 years corporate radio has not paid artists when they play their songs over the air - the same songs that attract millions of listeners and millions of advertising dollars to their stations.

In December 2007, a bill was introduced in Congress which would close this loophole in the copyright and ensure that AM and FM radio fairly compensates artists when their music is played on the radio. Let your member of Congress know that you support a fair performance right on radio


The money Google pays for ads on Youtube is pathetic, like 4 cents per 10,000 veiws or something, it really not worth much once you've paid your taxes and bank account fees.

The money makes sense when you're talking about millions of veiws, but also you'll have the USA tax man knocking on your door and that can be bad, if you haven't structured your business right.

What happens when you start to earn an income from shuffling ?

The tax man decides how you earn your money (the method has to legal for instance) the tax office will usually list what is considered financial 'income' and how much tax you pay on that income. They will also let you know what you don't have to pay tax on or what you get a tax deduction on.

If you earn money from your shuffling vid on youtube, then you are earning money from shuffling, because that's the content of the video. People watch your video for the shuffling, they don't sit and watch the Youtube logo for 3 minutes.

So it's your creative product that people watch and in turn advertisers pay Google to run the ad and you the content maker, get a very small share of all that cash.

Depending on your country, there will be laws regarding how much a person under 18 y/o or 21 y/o can legally make, and how they can make it. Some allow a small amount, say under $50 per 6 months as pocket money, to encourage young people to learn about business and earning an income first hand.

Most artists structure their business as 'sole trader', meaning that you are both the boss and employee, you mights have assistants occasionally on a project, but for the most part it's just you.

A dancer working for a live production such as a stage show, will usually become an employee of that stage production company for the duration of the production and be covered by employment laws and tax laws related to working for a boss.

An artist can expect to have a combination of being their own boss and working for a boss throughout their career.

It's best to talk to your folks and get some financial advice on how to set up Your Business, because even if you're just selling the occasional printed t-shirt, it's still a business as far as the tax man is concerned.

So you might be fine, and while you're young any earnings could go into a Family Trust Fund or something like that. It would depend on your family's financial set up as well, especially if you're still living at home.

This is the business part of art, it's complicated, competitive and quite brutal as a business - A blood bath to put it bluntly. Dancers only have maybe 10 years of A list dance jobs to make their career and nobody likes sitting around ageing waiting for jobs, they're all trying to grab an opportunity before their time is over.

So you will find other jealous dancers trying to sabotage your career and beat you out of a job - it's nasty but that's the industry. When there's typically 200 dancers for 1 spot, you can be sure the competition is fierce.

That will flow on to your money making merchandise area and the way you promote yourself on Youtube, you were right thinking about marketing yourself, because as artists working in Public, you become a product to sell, that does not mean you no longer function as a person, you are both.

So you will find you talk about yourself in the 3rd person after a while on how to market yourself, your persona, your public character, your career.

As someone who is by no means a professional, I'll add a little bit.

When you want to go on a path like this your success will depend only on your dedication and determination. It may seem like a no-brainer to some, but you really need to keep that in your mind all the time to keep going. It may not be glamorous or the best money, but sometimes you just need to follow your passions and know that it's enough. That's just my disclaimer though. I'm not trying to warn you off or anything, but rather just giving fair warning.

My only point to add is that you absolutely MUST act professional if you wish to be treated as such. You can't just throw up a messy poor quality video with the description 'jus me messin around lol' and hope to gain some attention. Set up shots with purpose, show what sets you apart, edit your videos, add a paragraph in the description about you/contributors/sponsors, ect. Hold yourself and your work to some sort of standard.
After that you can start to promote yourself.

Hope that helps a bit,
Czarina

Good post Czarina, yeah every new kid that enters the professional arena is a potential threat to someone who's fading. If you're going to finish your career in 2 years, you don't want some new comer knocking you off your perch before you want to go.

All that stuff is common place and typical of the competitive nature of the business, when your art has the potential of making many millions, you're really in the rough and tumble of Wall St.

So you're entering an adult world of high end business, more often than not based on the whims of what's fashionable than creative content, and you will need to stand out from them ... some how, that's both a logistics issue and luck.

You can take care of the logistics, such as having a professional quality youtube vid - or as best as you are able, no adults expect a teen to have as much professional experience as someone in the business for 30 years.

And even I can tell you, if I had a bigger budget I could do all sorts of stuff more professionally looking. So it's not your budget - how big it is, but what you do with what you've got, that's a better gauge of talent. The budget can be supplied by investors, the talent is a far rarer thing and investors need convincing it's the real thing. So emphasise your strengths

But above all yes, you must act professionally, you won't be taken seriously otherwise.

What are some good editing programs I can use for my shuffling for the videos to look better?

Also how exactly do you get sponsors and all that?

After effects and sony vegas with magic bullet looks plugins

I'm also wondering about the sponsoring stuff, I've been thinking about setting up shows and renting a space for shuffle practice and course for youngsters

I rented one last year, but with almost no income to advertise it didnt succed that well^^ :/ I did pretty good anyway though ^^ In the terms of creating new good members for my crew ^^

I'm agreeing with the "leave them wanting more" however on my channel I try to have one video the week, been hard latley though ^^ But in one year I got 200 subs ^^

Since last year my channel got erased, but I got it back, just blank -.-'

Well anyhow that how I made 200 subs one year

But now I'm thinking doing vlogs and stuff on the channel aswell in order to let the audience get to know me better also going to do some other dances, when I feel good enogh, but shuffle will always be my NR.1 passion!

Yeah thanks again Little Phan! I'm just trying to learn more about opportunities. Also hopefully I'll see you in the first American Melbourne Shuffle Championships if it works out which I'm hoping it will. ;o

Well you can start by impressing people. Give them a short video that will impress them and have them thinking "wow he's good. What other videos does he have" because my ex gf uploaded a video and she got 2000 likes but not one subscriber. Impress them first then go from there is what i say and good luck in your career Starkk.

p.s. am i still in EHA?

I'm not exactly the crew leader Markz but I'm pretty sure you're still in it, the leaders been very busy and crew stuff takes some time and I'm sure you've done nothing wrong so it's all good.

Also Garry I had talked to a lady in the mall near my grandma and she had said "NO." very firmly about filming. I didn't ask about events but the security guard said to ask management.

yeah solar told me im still in so its all good and i finally gave him my video for the crew shuffle

StarkShuffler wrote:Also Garry I had talked to a lady in the mall near my grandma and she had said "NO." very firmly about filming. I didn't ask about events but the security guard said to ask management.

Yeah that NO will be the standard response, until you get permission. Yes like the security says go to management. They will know the broader policy on filming and also this is a marketing opportunity for the mall to promote itself.

These are very tough economic times and won't improve quickly, so retail places like malls need to get prospective shoppers through their doors, this is one way to do that, hosting something that will certainly attract shufflers, who are generally well behaved and trustworthy, and lead to increased patronage to the mall shops.

There may be barriers to overcome with adults perceptions of who shufflers are, thinking firstly of others they've had to ban in the past, such as Malls here in Australia. Skate boards are banned, scooters and BMX/bikes are banned, running through crowds, loud noise, graffitti, shop lifters have all been problems etc.

Young people in shopping districts are often unfairly treated with scorn because others have ruined it for everyone in the past.

But your direct approach to management will demonstrate immediately to the Mall management shufflers are different, responsible and productive people, rather than destructive.

In your approach to the Mall Management, you'll probably have to make an appointment, which is normal. So in your approach - say going to the Mall office in person, if you give the management reception a simple one page cover letter, with your contact details and a paragraph or two (at most) about what you want to do, with a copy of the GS1 dvd I've sent you and mentioning briefly in the letter that it is ok for the management to copy the dvd for others in their organisation/business to veiw, you'll give them enough initial information for them to check out before seeing you.

You don't give them all the details, just the main parts, the main concept points - these are the selling points, the reasons why the Mall should be interested in this idea.

They will probably run the idea past some of their staff before responding to you. If their staff say yes this is a good idea, managment will weigh up the business considerations and probably then, they'll give you an appointment, more or less to discuss what they're interested in doing and nail down a deal with you.

If they see your letter and dvd and decide no, you'll probably just get a polite letter from the management saying thankyou but NO, and no appointment. If they say 'best wishes for the future', it means 'don't come back'. So you don't, you go to the next Mall